The promise of artificial intelligence is almost as large as our utter inability to effectively implement it, even in our attempts to coax computers into doing menial jobs such as identify which pictures contained a bowl of fruit. After all, if we were attempting to categorize a massive store of photos, the ability to pass these sorts of tasks off to computers would be great, right? However, what’s easy (and after a while, boring) for a human is turning out to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer.

Understanding the demand for these services, while also cognizant we’re nowhere near being able to carry them out with computers, Amazon created the Mechanical Turk Service, which turned AI on its head by paying humans small sums of money to do these sorts of boring tasks. It sounded interesting, however I can’t recall even investigating the site to learn more.

That is, until this morning, when I read Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ blog, and learned about this effort to find Jim Grey, a well known figure in the computer science field who had disappeared off the Pacific coast during a solo sailing trip. As it turns out, Amazon had arranged for a satellite to cover the territory in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the boat. They then uploaded the pictures to the Mechanical Turk, and invited everybody to sift through the photos. While not foolproof, this clearly greatly raises the possibility he could be located presuming the boat is of course still afloat.

It’s an absolutely fascinating approach to resolving the problem. I’ve signed up, and took a few minutes to sift through about 10 photos. Consider doing the same, it only takes a few minutes, is a very interesting approach, and of course could result in his rescue.

Jason